It typically costs more for the soundtrack to a movie than the DVD of the movie itself. Particularly after both have been on shelves for six months or so. The music industry continues to overcharge for their product and then sue it's own customers when they bypass those costs.
There's already a company making this. Currently, the conversion kits are hand made and $2000 each. They hope that demand can bring the cost down.
The drawback of all these charging methods is deep charging your Prius battery decreases its lifetime. Currently, a hybrid battery should last about as long as a normal automatic transmission. Changing the charge cycle might bring that down sharply. Or it might not.
What will be really fun is when the new crop of explosionless high density lithium ion batteries are cleared for Prius use, dropping the curb weight and permitting deeper charges than the current battery technology. Combine that with roof solar cells and we could see a real jump in MPG and an increase in power (due to lower curb weight).
It would be a mistake to think that if MS gets a good revenue stream from XBox Live that a similar feature won't appear in Sony's next machine. In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't already announced. MS has gotten an early lead by being first, but they also get to make all the mistakes. And if there's truth to the stability issues I've been hearing, they may have actually done themselves more harm than good in the rush to make Christmas. If the platform gets a reputation as being unstable, it will make it much easier for Sony to strip away frustrated customers. If they toss in an online service as well, it makes it even more enticing.
Remember, the XBox 360 is not competing with this generation of Sony and Nintendo hardware, but with next year's model. Sony actually has a chance as market leader to play the expectations game MS deployed so successfully to crush OS/2 when it shipped a year ahead of Windows 95. Build up expectations higher than the XBox 360 can deliver today and you can prevent too many people from getting emotionally bonded to the MS hardware.
The difficulty is, being a game console, they have to keep the price point down. $300 to $400 seems to be the most that can be extracted for a console. But if they can do it, so can Sony and Nintendo. The games, of course, are not portable, but to truly lock the home entertainment customers in, they'll need something else.
As for XBox Live, it is still too easy to switch ISPs. And I'm guessing it will be just as easy to switch multiplayer game services. Again, those addicted to a particular game will be easy to hold, but other households will bolt if MS begins anything monopolistic.
So, how do you lock people down as thoroughly as the OS does? It can't be downloaded data (movies, etc), as the hard drive is small and the optical drive can't burn. It can't be contracts, as make it too hard to jump and people won't bite. It can't be content, because Sony has deep enough pockets to fight back with its own content. Not to mention their own movie studios.
Honestly, I don't see any way to lock the customers in at this point. Worse, since they are competing at the same price point, they're not going to drive out Sony with low pricing. Currently, they seem to be genuinely competing on merit. And that is quite an interesting thing to see.
Actually, its quite simple. A fool and his money are soon parted, true, unless the fool has a lot of money. It takes time and effort to loose billions of dollars. One must be inspired. One must have some sort of job or hobby that can be used to throw away vast quantities of money. After all, one can be quite stupid but still inherit a trust fund already engineered to perpetuate one's money. And then one can live quite comfortably not knowing the details of how that money is managed. Or, one can be at the head of a company with so much spare cash, inertia and illegally maintained monopoly position that one can afford to be caught unawares by several changes in the direction of the industry.
Yes, Mr. Gates is not stupid. However, having made a large chunk of money does not provide some sort of immunization from the daily idiocy we are all capable of. We know of at least one occasion already where MS was caught totally off guard and had to scramble to catch up (the Internet) and was only able to do so by exploiting their monopoly status elsewhere. Had they not had that natural advantage, their clocks would have been cleaned and sanitized.
I wonder how much these claws were used as a sexual display, both to advertise maturity and to threaten potential rivals. Think about it, most of the time when some animal sports some enlarged, prominent body part, it isn't for hunting, but for mating displays.
Perhaps, way back when, this was merely a giant evolutionary contest to see just who had the biggest claws in the neighborhood...
Except there will be an observation gap between the time Hubble goes dark and Webb goes online. Plus, for all its grandure, Webb is not serviceable. We cannot fly up to Webb and install a spiffy new camera. So we will have a cutting edge telescope for the first couple years, a middling 'scope for the next few and an antique for the last part of its life. Compare this with Hubble, which is on its third or fourth camera at this point, each camera bringing a wealth of new data and new capabilities, all for the cost of a camera and a shuttle shot, as opposed to a new 'scope.
Yep, single words and minor misspellings. Like, for instance, the Number of the Beast. Turns out it was 616 in earlier editions. Never mind, just a minor misspelling of a single word. Doesn't change anything, really.
All the way down? Garbage, we all know its just one turtle, Great A'Tuin, gliding majestically through space. Earthquakes above 7.0 are caused by its mighty digestive tract. Earthquakes below 7.0 are merely the elephants shifting their feet.
Actually, he's correct. Scientists have long wondered whether neutrinos have mass or not. If they did have mass, it would solve a couple of long standing problems - the missing neutrinos from the Sun and it would provide a very strong candidate for dark matter.
Well, as it happens, experimental technology finally was able to nail down the question of neutrino mass (by using the Earth as a shielding device) and sure enough, they have a very, very tiny, but measurable mass. This solved the solar neutrino problem, but did nothing for dark matter.
Although neutrinos are an excellent candidate, their mass is simply too small. Or rather, there just aren't enough of them to account for the dark matter we can detect (via galactic rotation).
On the other hand, COBE and WMAP data were indicating that not only was dark matter present, but it most likely followed the WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) theory of dark matter. (Discarded candidates include MACHOs - massively compact halo objects - brown dwarfs and other chunks of nonlumious matter in the galactic halo; and weakly interacting light particles [no fun name] - neutrinos and the more exotic [and as yet not proven to exist] axions.)
Meanwhile, Brookhaven National Labs had noticed something odd. Muons weren't spinning like they should. And, through some rather esoteric arguments best presented in Feynman diagrams, this indicated some missing physics from the standard model. So far, there's not much to go on, but that never stopped theoretical physicists. Many papers are already running around demonstrating this violation is consistent (consistent, mind, it doesn't rule out other explanations) with the muon interacting with a field of supersymmetric particles.
Now, supersymmetric particles are the WIMP candidate of choice. They are very, very heavy and they don't interact with normal matter except gravitationally. And, if some of the preliminary string theory models of cosmology are correct, there should be a hell of a lot of them.
Now, your criticism that the poster has accepted the dark matter hypothesis as fact is nothing more than good science. Multiple independent lines of investigation have demonstrated that there is something out there not accounted for in the standard model of physics. We also know how much of it there is, how it interacts with gravity and electromagnetism (and we can make some damn good educated guesses about strong and weak force), where it conglomerates and can even map its spread through galactic clusters. Given this array of evidence, accepting dark matter as a fact quite acceptable.
As far as neutrinos, again, at one time, this was a hell of a good theory. It all hinged on how heavy the buggers were. As it turns out, they're too light to account for all the dark matter (but they certainly contribute - they are, in fact, dark matter, just not all of it). A real scientist would accept these two facts, as they are well backed up now by both theory and observation, and get cracking on just what it is making those muons wobble as well as devising some more experiments to pin down what these extra interactions are.
Perhaps because the free market has been futzing around for the better part of a decade without much real improvement. Sure, we have a variety of platforms and a variety of providers, but somehow, they just aren't competeing.
Amazing how they're all priced within a dollar or two of each other, isn't it?
The problem here is there isn't a profit motive for lowering prices. So long as all companies involved accept the current price, consumers are stuck paying it. And they've found a price to penetration level they are happy with and don't appear to be moving.
Meanwhile, countries like Japan and Korea, who made it a social priority to have cheap, ubiquitous broadband have lapped us.
Bullshit. Judicial activism is just a name for rulings one particular group doesn't like. It is not a serious problem with modern government, but evidence of a properly balanced government.
Or were you really that offended when the 'activist judges' blocked Congress' grandstanding attempt to reinsert Terry Schiavo's feeding tube?
So they're saying the states have the right to enforce limits on what the state may and may not seize? Why am I reminded of foxes guarding hen houses?
The whole point of RIGHTS is to prevent the tyrannical majority from deciding a minority doesn't have any say. If I own something, I own it. The local government shouldn't be allowed to seize it because they think they have something better to do with it. And personally, seeing the amount of graft in local land development here in town, I don't trust local government to look to anyone but the developer's needs. Were it not for environmental restrictions and state parks, the developers would be plowing under the desert straight up the sides of the mountains, constantly building higher and higher McMansions. The ONLY thing that stopped them was park boundaries and environmental impacts. The say of the local community meant nothing.
So forgive me, but I see this ruling as a disaster - a land giveaway to those who can afford the price of a local politician. And these days, that ain't much.
I just made these changes to my Win2K box at work. Now I have "Computer" and "Documents" in the upper left corner. Opening "Documents" yields "Pictures", "Music" and so on.
Now I'm up to date with all useful Longhorn changes! No need to install!
Today Aal Phylari Enallii of the Jovian Defense Center issued a statement indicating the pathetic meatbags of the third and fourth planets have allowed their feeble war to spread to the glorious Jovian system. Director Phylari is calling for cometary bombardment of both rocks until "rock four is as wet as rock three used to be."
Not bad for the length of the article. If you want to understand this all in more detail, I suggest visiting the talk.origins FAQ website. Here is their introduction to Evolutionary Biology. And here is the talkdesign.org (a daughter site devoted to ID) FAQ on refuting Intelligent Design.
This idea would ultimately be a limit to God. What would happen when, after confronting something mysterious for years, Science suddenly renders up a rather mundane, but accurate solution to the mystery? If a proof of God depended on this mystery, what becomes of it?
Consider this instance. We have two deep mysteries, the smoothness of the background radiation and the seeming presence of dark energy. Both, you argue, don't quite make sense under our current understanding and are, therefore, candidates as proof of a higher power.
Now along come these chaps from Fermilab and demonstrate, using some really neat math, that dark energy is just inflation, the solution to the smoothness problem, writ large. Nothing here that isn't predicted by old theory. We just weren't thinking about it clever enough. Suppose this is all born out. Where does this leave your God?
This is the problem with the God of Gaps. If you go looking at each gap in our scientific understanding and cry, "Here be God!" you are likely to get a nasty shock if the gap is filled.
This has already happened with Creationists who accept some evolution. First, God dwelt in the gaps between species. Microevolution is possible, but speciation requires God. Then speciation is demonstrated in bacteria. Okay, well God is required for multicellular speciation. Then its demonstrated in fruit flies. Okay, well God is required for higher life forms. Then genus level evolution is demonstrated. Okay, nothing can change phylum without God. And so it goes. God is narrowed and narrowed by each burst of science, becoming a pitiful God of Gaps, living in the few spaces left between the known science.
Better, I think, is a reexamination of one's needs and demand for Proof. Or, more precisely, a need for the Proof to fit one's preconceived notions of the nature and identity of God.
There is not an absence of evidence that the two did not coexist. There is, instead, a large body of evidence that they did NOT coexist. Being generous with the definition of humans, the earliest humans appear 5,000,000 years ago. The last dinosaurs disappeared 76,000,000 years ago. No humans appear in strata associated with dinosaurs. No dinosaurs appear in strata associated with humans.
And as for transitional species, plenty have been discovered. The difficulty is a lack in understanding of what constitutes a transitional species. Since all species represented in the fossil record are, by their very existence, evolutionary successes, they are all fairly well adapted to their environment. The Creationists, on the other hand, persist in their belief that a transitional fossil must be some clumsy hybrid - a dinosaur with one wing or a snake with the legs missing from the left side of its body. Pointing to genuine transitional forms, such as archaeopteryx, sinornithosaurus or ambulocetus only produces a demand to see all the steps between compsognathus and archaeopteryx.
In short, when one is unwilling to look past one's preconceived ideas to actual evidence, no amount of proof will suffice.
Slashdot Mirror
It typically costs more for the soundtrack to a movie than the DVD of the movie itself. Particularly after both have been on shelves for six months or so. The music industry continues to overcharge for their product and then sue it's own customers when they bypass those costs.
There's already a company making this. Currently, the conversion kits are hand made and $2000 each. They hope that demand can bring the cost down.
The drawback of all these charging methods is deep charging your Prius battery decreases its lifetime. Currently, a hybrid battery should last about as long as a normal automatic transmission. Changing the charge cycle might bring that down sharply. Or it might not.
What will be really fun is when the new crop of explosionless high density lithium ion batteries are cleared for Prius use, dropping the curb weight and permitting deeper charges than the current battery technology. Combine that with roof solar cells and we could see a real jump in MPG and an increase in power (due to lower curb weight).
It would be a mistake to think that if MS gets a good revenue stream from XBox Live that a similar feature won't appear in Sony's next machine. In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't already announced. MS has gotten an early lead by being first, but they also get to make all the mistakes. And if there's truth to the stability issues I've been hearing, they may have actually done themselves more harm than good in the rush to make Christmas. If the platform gets a reputation as being unstable, it will make it much easier for Sony to strip away frustrated customers. If they toss in an online service as well, it makes it even more enticing.
Remember, the XBox 360 is not competing with this generation of Sony and Nintendo hardware, but with next year's model. Sony actually has a chance as market leader to play the expectations game MS deployed so successfully to crush OS/2 when it shipped a year ahead of Windows 95. Build up expectations higher than the XBox 360 can deliver today and you can prevent too many people from getting emotionally bonded to the MS hardware.
The difficulty is, being a game console, they have to keep the price point down. $300 to $400 seems to be the most that can be extracted for a console. But if they can do it, so can Sony and Nintendo. The games, of course, are not portable, but to truly lock the home entertainment customers in, they'll need something else.
As for XBox Live, it is still too easy to switch ISPs. And I'm guessing it will be just as easy to switch multiplayer game services. Again, those addicted to a particular game will be easy to hold, but other households will bolt if MS begins anything monopolistic.
So, how do you lock people down as thoroughly as the OS does? It can't be downloaded data (movies, etc), as the hard drive is small and the optical drive can't burn. It can't be contracts, as make it too hard to jump and people won't bite. It can't be content, because Sony has deep enough pockets to fight back with its own content. Not to mention their own movie studios.
Honestly, I don't see any way to lock the customers in at this point. Worse, since they are competing at the same price point, they're not going to drive out Sony with low pricing. Currently, they seem to be genuinely competing on merit. And that is quite an interesting thing to see.
You don't even need to go that far. NASA has pictures. Behold his noodly appendage!
If Genesis is the literal and complete truth in every detail, who did Cain and Abel have kids with?
Oh, that's easy.
Actually, its quite simple. A fool and his money are soon parted, true, unless the fool has a lot of money. It takes time and effort to loose billions of dollars. One must be inspired. One must have some sort of job or hobby that can be used to throw away vast quantities of money. After all, one can be quite stupid but still inherit a trust fund already engineered to perpetuate one's money. And then one can live quite comfortably not knowing the details of how that money is managed. Or, one can be at the head of a company with so much spare cash, inertia and illegally maintained monopoly position that one can afford to be caught unawares by several changes in the direction of the industry.
Yes, Mr. Gates is not stupid. However, having made a large chunk of money does not provide some sort of immunization from the daily idiocy we are all capable of. We know of at least one occasion already where MS was caught totally off guard and had to scramble to catch up (the Internet) and was only able to do so by exploiting their monopoly status elsewhere. Had they not had that natural advantage, their clocks would have been cleaned and sanitized.
I wonder how much these claws were used as a sexual display, both to advertise maturity and to threaten potential rivals. Think about it, most of the time when some animal sports some enlarged, prominent body part, it isn't for hunting, but for mating displays.
Perhaps, way back when, this was merely a giant evolutionary contest to see just who had the biggest claws in the neighborhood...
Yeah! And I'm not buying WoW until I get broadband! So what are you going to do about it?
(Worth a shot...)
Except there will be an observation gap between the time Hubble goes dark and Webb goes online. Plus, for all its grandure, Webb is not serviceable. We cannot fly up to Webb and install a spiffy new camera. So we will have a cutting edge telescope for the first couple years, a middling 'scope for the next few and an antique for the last part of its life. Compare this with Hubble, which is on its third or fourth camera at this point, each camera bringing a wealth of new data and new capabilities, all for the cost of a camera and a shuttle shot, as opposed to a new 'scope.
Yep, single words and minor misspellings. Like, for instance, the Number of the Beast. Turns out it was 616 in earlier editions. Never mind, just a minor misspelling of a single word. Doesn't change anything, really.
All the way down? Garbage, we all know its just one turtle, Great A'Tuin, gliding majestically through space. Earthquakes above 7.0 are caused by its mighty digestive tract. Earthquakes below 7.0 are merely the elephants shifting their feet.
Actually, he's correct. Scientists have long wondered whether neutrinos have mass or not. If they did have mass, it would solve a couple of long standing problems - the missing neutrinos from the Sun and it would provide a very strong candidate for dark matter.
Well, as it happens, experimental technology finally was able to nail down the question of neutrino mass (by using the Earth as a shielding device) and sure enough, they have a very, very tiny, but measurable mass. This solved the solar neutrino problem, but did nothing for dark matter.
Although neutrinos are an excellent candidate, their mass is simply too small. Or rather, there just aren't enough of them to account for the dark matter we can detect (via galactic rotation).
On the other hand, COBE and WMAP data were indicating that not only was dark matter present, but it most likely followed the WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) theory of dark matter. (Discarded candidates include MACHOs - massively compact halo objects - brown dwarfs and other chunks of nonlumious matter in the galactic halo; and weakly interacting light particles [no fun name] - neutrinos and the more exotic [and as yet not proven to exist] axions.)
Meanwhile, Brookhaven National Labs had noticed something odd. Muons weren't spinning like they should. And, through some rather esoteric arguments best presented in Feynman diagrams, this indicated some missing physics from the standard model. So far, there's not much to go on, but that never stopped theoretical physicists. Many papers are already running around demonstrating this violation is consistent (consistent, mind, it doesn't rule out other explanations) with the muon interacting with a field of supersymmetric particles.
Now, supersymmetric particles are the WIMP candidate of choice. They are very, very heavy and they don't interact with normal matter except gravitationally. And, if some of the preliminary string theory models of cosmology are correct, there should be a hell of a lot of them.
Now, your criticism that the poster has accepted the dark matter hypothesis as fact is nothing more than good science. Multiple independent lines of investigation have demonstrated that there is something out there not accounted for in the standard model of physics. We also know how much of it there is, how it interacts with gravity and electromagnetism (and we can make some damn good educated guesses about strong and weak force), where it conglomerates and can even map its spread through galactic clusters. Given this array of evidence, accepting dark matter as a fact quite acceptable.
As far as neutrinos, again, at one time, this was a hell of a good theory. It all hinged on how heavy the buggers were. As it turns out, they're too light to account for all the dark matter (but they certainly contribute - they are, in fact, dark matter, just not all of it). A real scientist would accept these two facts, as they are well backed up now by both theory and observation, and get cracking on just what it is making those muons wobble as well as devising some more experiments to pin down what these extra interactions are.
Perhaps because the free market has been futzing around for the better part of a decade without much real improvement. Sure, we have a variety of platforms and a variety of providers, but somehow, they just aren't competeing.
Amazing how they're all priced within a dollar or two of each other, isn't it?
The problem here is there isn't a profit motive for lowering prices. So long as all companies involved accept the current price, consumers are stuck paying it. And they've found a price to penetration level they are happy with and don't appear to be moving.
Meanwhile, countries like Japan and Korea, who made it a social priority to have cheap, ubiquitous broadband have lapped us.
Bullshit. Judicial activism is just a name for rulings one particular group doesn't like. It is not a serious problem with modern government, but evidence of a properly balanced government.
Or were you really that offended when the 'activist judges' blocked Congress' grandstanding attempt to reinsert Terry Schiavo's feeding tube?
Hmm, I believe for the Jedi religion,that second quote now reads:
Luke 10:19 But I wanted to go to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!
So they're saying the states have the right to enforce limits on what the state may and may not seize? Why am I reminded of foxes guarding hen houses?
The whole point of RIGHTS is to prevent the tyrannical majority from deciding a minority doesn't have any say. If I own something, I own it. The local government shouldn't be allowed to seize it because they think they have something better to do with it. And personally, seeing the amount of graft in local land development here in town, I don't trust local government to look to anyone but the developer's needs. Were it not for environmental restrictions and state parks, the developers would be plowing under the desert straight up the sides of the mountains, constantly building higher and higher McMansions. The ONLY thing that stopped them was park boundaries and environmental impacts. The say of the local community meant nothing.
So forgive me, but I see this ruling as a disaster - a land giveaway to those who can afford the price of a local politician. And these days, that ain't much.
Only if you've got the money to prove it, bucko.
You know what's really strange? That was my first thought too. Seriously.
I just made these changes to my Win2K box at work. Now I have "Computer" and "Documents" in the upper left corner. Opening "Documents" yields "Pictures", "Music" and so on.
Now I'm up to date with all useful Longhorn changes! No need to install!
Well, their second choice was 'Madison', so its probably for the best.
Today Aal Phylari Enallii of the Jovian Defense Center issued a statement indicating the pathetic meatbags of the third and fourth planets have allowed their feeble war to spread to the glorious Jovian system. Director Phylari is calling for cometary bombardment of both rocks until "rock four is as wet as rock three used to be."
Not bad for the length of the article. If you want to understand this all in more detail, I suggest visiting the talk.origins FAQ website. Here is their introduction to Evolutionary Biology. And here is the talkdesign.org (a daughter site devoted to ID) FAQ on refuting Intelligent Design.
This idea would ultimately be a limit to God. What would happen when, after confronting something mysterious for years, Science suddenly renders up a rather mundane, but accurate solution to the mystery? If a proof of God depended on this mystery, what becomes of it?
Consider this instance. We have two deep mysteries, the smoothness of the background radiation and the seeming presence of dark energy. Both, you argue, don't quite make sense under our current understanding and are, therefore, candidates as proof of a higher power.
Now along come these chaps from Fermilab and demonstrate, using some really neat math, that dark energy is just inflation, the solution to the smoothness problem, writ large. Nothing here that isn't predicted by old theory. We just weren't thinking about it clever enough. Suppose this is all born out. Where does this leave your God?
This is the problem with the God of Gaps. If you go looking at each gap in our scientific understanding and cry, "Here be God!" you are likely to get a nasty shock if the gap is filled.
This has already happened with Creationists who accept some evolution. First, God dwelt in the gaps between species. Microevolution is possible, but speciation requires God. Then speciation is demonstrated in bacteria. Okay, well God is required for multicellular speciation. Then its demonstrated in fruit flies. Okay, well God is required for higher life forms. Then genus level evolution is demonstrated. Okay, nothing can change phylum without God. And so it goes. God is narrowed and narrowed by each burst of science, becoming a pitiful God of Gaps, living in the few spaces left between the known science.
Better, I think, is a reexamination of one's needs and demand for Proof. Or, more precisely, a need for the Proof to fit one's preconceived notions of the nature and identity of God.
There is not an absence of evidence that the two did not coexist. There is, instead, a large body of evidence that they did NOT coexist. Being generous with the definition of humans, the earliest humans appear 5,000,000 years ago. The last dinosaurs disappeared 76,000,000 years ago. No humans appear in strata associated with dinosaurs. No dinosaurs appear in strata associated with humans.
And as for transitional species, plenty have been discovered. The difficulty is a lack in understanding of what constitutes a transitional species. Since all species represented in the fossil record are, by their very existence, evolutionary successes, they are all fairly well adapted to their environment. The Creationists, on the other hand, persist in their belief that a transitional fossil must be some clumsy hybrid - a dinosaur with one wing or a snake with the legs missing from the left side of its body. Pointing to genuine transitional forms, such as archaeopteryx, sinornithosaurus or ambulocetus only produces a demand to see all the steps between compsognathus and archaeopteryx.
In short, when one is unwilling to look past one's preconceived ideas to actual evidence, no amount of proof will suffice.